Online Conversion

Here is an excellent summary of the kinds of user testing you can employee, and how to choose.

Have you considered trying any of these. We would love to hear what you found.

The steps we take as conversion optimizers look suspiciously like designers. Each of theses steps can use more data, though:User PersonasJob StoriesUsability TestingAffinity Mapping2x2 AnalysisProblem DefinitionIdeate & CreateMockupsPrototypeValidateOur task is to execute on this with high frequency and make small changes as we go to learn what moves the needle.

Why do business owners rely on the "expertise" of designers when designers repeatedly fail to improve websites? Because the errors in the system get lost in the blame game. This is the gift of complexity. "People who are bred, selected, and compensated to find complicated solutions do not have an incentive to implement simplified ones." Let data provide some simplicity.

"One of the chief advantages that e-commerce companies currently wield over their real-world counterparts are vast troves of detailed data on purchases and shopping habits. " How are you applying behavioral data to your online store? Will you be the next dinosaur?

Pretty much naked it. We can show you how in 2017.

My advice to my clients is to put as much (or more) effort into your images as you put into your copy on a web page. Here are some great tips on how to craft images that work with your copy to advance your value proposition.

This article lists to the problems will be solving in 2017: marketers are stuck in data collection mode, and not data use mode; and that marketing software is too damn hard to use. We want to show marketers how to use data to make great decisions. And until the tools get easier-to-use, we provide the teams that know how to turn the knobs pull the levers and make these tools work well.

If these answers don't ring true with you, you're not ready for conversion optimization. "Why do [Designers] want to get bogged down in all of this marketing stuff? I like building websites - and that's what I want to do." There are two simple answers: Money. Money."

I love it when designers talk about hypotheses and tests. "I use this process to help teams frame their work as a business problem to solve (rather than a solution to implement) and then dissect that business problem into its core assumptions. We then weave those assumptions into hypotheses. Finally, we design experiments to test our riskiest hypotheses."

One of the things we rely on our designers for is their knowledge of how font typeface, size and color work on our pages. This is a nice primer for marketers and business owners who want to understand this skill a little better.

Here's a nice roundup of do's and don'ts for conversion rate optimizers. Even experienced AB testers like us need to be reminded of the "big rocks" of CRO, and this article has them. Process, segmentation, qualitative research, and mobile.

We are living in a golden age of marketing.

@_EricElliott makes a strong case for choosing Web apps for your mobile users over deploying native apps through the app stores. We can add to this that AB testing Web apps (Elliott calls them progressive web apps) is easier with the tools we have. Many advanced tools don't yet support native applications.

However, responsive web designs aren't enough. You should still put the effort in to craft a mobile-centric web app, as if you were developing a native app.

Regular expressions rear their ugly head in more and more places. Google Analytics is just one.

For me the regular expression showed up in the excellent Yoast SEO plugin for Wordpress. I needed to redirect a URL that had parameters, like this:

http://conversionsciences.com/conversion-upside-report/?t=10000&v=344&x=250

To do this, I could not use a regular redirect, as everything after the ? would be stripped away. I needed to use a Regular Expression Redirect. However, this sort of thing -- using query parameters -- wasn't covered in any of the Yoast documentation.

This article gave me the hint I needed, and the technique that ended up working. To summarize, I used the following regular expression to match my URL with the parameters:

^\/conversion-upside-report($|\/.*$)

The parentheses save the matching contents into a variable, which I can access using $1 in the new URL, like this:

resources/conversion-rate-optimization-calculator/upside-report/$1

It worked great. Give it a try: http://conversionsciences.com/conversion-upside-report/?t=10000&v=344&x=250

Thanks to Himanshu.

This sentence summarizes why website optimization is hard: "But despite our intellect and like all earthly creatures, the mental circuitry of our biological ancestors had been optimized by evolution for a world where timeliness was more valuable than accuracy."

it's interesting that scientists side to use stories -- from The Moth podcast -- to stimulate test subjects' brains in this fMRI study. The conclusion is that these stories stimulate areas scattered across our cortex. Stories light up our brains. No wonder storytelling I'd so powerful in marketing.

Bryan and Jeffery Eisenberg often say, "You can't read the label from inside the bottle." It means that you can't really see the solution to a problem if you're too close to it.

This may be a good argument for bringing in consultants for your most important business processes. After working with a client for a year or more, we often find ourselves inside the bottle with them and have to get outside influences to read the label.

Apparently, there is a firm psychological principle at work here that can be measured. What does the label say on your business bottle?

We often advocate for "stacked" forms vs. multi-column forms. Here is some research that reinforces that. Stacked forms are completed much faster than side-by-side fields.

This is a good overview of design trends from 2016. Not all of these trends are good ideas from a conversion optimization standpoint.

Scroll Animations, Large Thematic Images, Animated Micrinteractions, and Brutalism are probably hurting conversion rates.

The author makes a very important point: "this sort of experiment requires thorough research and in many cases the final result comes via several iterations tested and analyzed in terms of usability and visual perception."